Israel

People against the elite

A PALPABLE shudder swept through half of Israel on July 31st with the news that Shimon Peres had unexpectedly lost the presidency to the affable but undistinguished Likud candidate, Moshe Katzav, in a Knesset vote. The other half leapt for joy.

The split goes back to 1977 when, in Israel's first political “earthquake”, Mr Peres's long-governing Labour Party lost a general election to Menachem Begin, the head of a rightist-religious coalition. That same coalition, supported mainly by the Sephardic proletariat and by Russian immigrants, brought Binyamin Netanyahu to power in 1996. Then, too, the losing candidate was Shimon Peres, running on the peace platform of the murdered Yitzhak Rabin. Then, too, the nation felt itself irreparably ruptured.

“Peres has been defeated,” said Amos Oz, an Israeli writer, on August 1st, “by a joint front that is hawkish and ultra-Orthodox, that spurns realism and rejects peace, that hates progressiveness and enlightenment.” The new president's brother, mayor of the poor southern town of Kiryat Malachi to which the Katzav family came from Iran in the early 1950s, put it another way. “The people”, he proclaimed, “have defeated the elite.” Mr Katzav demurred. “I'm elite too,” he insisted. “I will be everyone's president.”

The president's role is largely ceremonial. But the prestige of the office can give the incumbent oblique political influence. The outgoing president, Ezer Weizman, who was forced to resign over financial irregularities, criticised the Rabin-Peres government for pursuing the peace process during a wave of Palestinian terror bombings—but was even more scathing in his attacks on Mr Netanyahu for failing to pursue peace. Mr Katzav says he will lock away his political beliefs during his seven-year term and concentrate on the country's social and economic problems. But he has already slipped in some remarks about “united Jerusalem”, even though the dispute with the Palestinians, and the controversy within Israel, over the future of the city is at the heart of current peace-making efforts.

On the right, Mr Katzav's victory, and more particularly Mr Peres's defeat, is seen as auguring the end of those efforts. A jubilant Ariel Sharon, the leader of the Likud, proclaimed that “the national camp” which had defeated Mr Peres by 63 votes to 57 would go on to defeat Ehud Barak.Yet, that same afternoon, Mr Barak's rump coalition survived a no-confidence motion, moved by the Likud in the Knesset, and can now look forward to nearly three months of parliamentary impregnability during the summer recess. (A bill that was passed on August 2nd, the last day of the session, providing for early elections, requires further readings before it becomes law.)

But autumn seems the outside limit of the government's life expectancy, as even Mr Barak's most loyal supporters concede. On August 2nd, his foreign minister, David Levy, resigned over the peace policy. Pundits suggested that this old campaigner, who moved across to Mr Barak from the Likud, may have sensed the imminent implosion of his new political home.

A peace agreement with the Palestinians, if Mr Barak could get one by the time the Knesset returns in October, would reverse his sinking fortunes. Not that the Knesset is likely to support such a peace: Mr Sharon is probably right about that. But does this Knesset, which spurned Mr Peres, a Nobel peace laureate, represent the will of the people on peace? Mr Barak says he is sure it does not, and the opinion polls seem to support him.